Asymptotic dimension of minor-closed families and Assouad–Nagata dimension of surfaces

  • Marthe Bonamy

    Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France
  • Nicolas Bousquet

    Université de Lyon, Villeurbanne, France
  • Louis Esperet

    Université Grenoble Alpes, France
  • Carla Groenland

    Utrecht University, Netherlands
  • Chun-Hung Liu

    Texas A&M University, College Station, USA
  • François Pirot

    Université Grenoble Alpes, France
  • Alexander Scott

    University of Oxford, UK
Asymptotic dimension of minor-closed families and Assouad–Nagata dimension of surfaces cover
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Abstract

The asymptotic dimension is an invariant of metric spaces introduced by Gromov in the context of geometric group theory. In this paper, we study the asymptotic dimension of metric spaces generated by graphs and their shortest path metric and show their applications to some continuous spaces. The asymptotic dimension of such graph metrics can be seen as a large scale generalisation of weak diameter network decomposition which has been extensively studied in computer science.

We prove that every proper minor-closed family of graphs has asymptotic dimension at most 2, which gives optimal answers to a question of Fujiwara and Papasoglu and (in a strong form) to a problem raised by Ostrovskii and Rosenthal on minor excluded groups. For some special minorclosed families, such as the class of graphs embeddable in a surface of bounded Euler genus, we prove a stronger result and apply this to show that complete Riemannian surfaces have Assouad–Nagata dimension at most 2. Furthermore, our techniques allow us to determine the asymptotic dimension of graphs of bounded layered treewidth and graphs with any fixed growth rate, which are graph classes that are defined by purely combinatorial notions and properly contain graph classes with some natural topological and geometric flavours.

Cite this article

Marthe Bonamy, Nicolas Bousquet, Louis Esperet, Carla Groenland, Chun-Hung Liu, François Pirot, Alexander Scott, Asymptotic dimension of minor-closed families and Assouad–Nagata dimension of surfaces. J. Eur. Math. Soc. 26 (2024), no. 10, pp. 3739–3791

DOI 10.4171/JEMS/1341